Day 1: Friday, March 7

Yee-haw, dude! I am once again in Austin, capital city of Texas and hipster capital of the South, for the South By Southwest Film Festival. This is only my third time at SXSW, but it’s already one of my favorite annual events: fun movies, fun friends, and fun parties. And I don’t care what you’ve heard on the street, I like fun things.

I arrived last night without incident, but some of my friends weren’t so lucky. Scott Weinberg, Eugene Novikov, and Jason Whyte (all acquaintances from eFilmCritic.com and elsewhere) had connecting flights in Dallas that were canceled due to weather. Who knew they had weather in Dallas? Weinberg and Eugene rented a car to drive from there to Austin, while Jason hitched a ride with someone, and all of their luggage remained behind (as did Eugene’s driver’s license, which he left on the counter at the rental agency).

The only incident of note in my travels was when I landed in Austin and saw the usual line of hired drivers holding cards bearing the names of the passengers they were collecting, and one of the cards said “Brown Mary.” Not Mary Brown; not even Brown comma Mary; just Brown Mary. Naturally, my first thought was, “Big wheel keep on turnin’; Brown Mary keep on burnin’.”  Whoever or whatever you are, Brown Mary, I salute you.

This alleged “weather” in Dallas had far-reaching effects, as we discovered today. We’d been invited to a special press screening of “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” which is premiering in the festival tomorrow night, but learned upon reaching the theater today that the print had not arrived. The screening was pushed back to 5 and then to 6, which threw everything out of whack because some of us were planning to see other films at 5 or 6. And when you skip a movie, it sets off a domino effect, because you want to see it at a later showing, but then that later showing conflicts with something else, and so you have to look for another showing of THAT movie, and before you know it you’re sitting in the corner with a highlighter pen and a screening schedule, sobbing.

Nonetheless, most of us decided to go to the rescheduled “Harold & Kumar” press showing. We had a few afternoon hours to kill in the meantime, and as it happens, my Fat Brother Jeff was here! His company has sent him for SXSW’s Interactive Festival, which includes panels and workshops and a trade show related to tech-geek-computer-Internet-nerd things. (The “Interactive” label is odd, considering it is aimed at people who sit at their computers all day and never interact with anyone.) This was the first-ever juxtaposition of my family world and my movie world. Jeff and I ate lunch at Jack in the Box (mm-mmm, local flavor!) then went to the Austin Convention Center to get our festival badges. This massively chaotic and time-consuming process seems to have gotten slightly less chaotic and time-consuming than in previous years, so hooray for progress.

Jeff went about his computer-nerd business and I headed to the hotel room being shared by Weinberg and Erik Childress, which for some reason always winds being the base of operations for all of our associates. Sure enough, the room was already littered with movie critics: Weinberg, Childress, Eugene, Jason, Will Goss, and Erik Davis, who is Weinberg’s and my boss at Cinematical. A DVD screener of some festival film was playing, but whatever interest the group had had in it to begin with had waned by the time I arrived, and now there was mostly chatter and schedule-making and the sort of merriment you’d expect to find in hotel room crammed full of snarky, opinionated movie geeks. It was just like heaven, only smellier.

Weinberg and Eugene returned their rental car and came back with Liz, a friend of Weinberg’s who was going to give us a ride to the Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar for “Harold & Kumar.” We love this venue, but we do not love its location, two miles south of almost all the other SXSW venues. Six of us crammed into Liz’s small sedan, a car that comfortably seats four, uncomfortably seats five, and impossibly seats six. The laws of both traffic and physics were broken in the process, but we made it to the Drafthouse.

The screening did not start at 6, nor even at 6:30. As the time approached 7:00, we calculated the very latest the film could start before we’d have to abandon it altogether in the interest of not missing our 9:30 film (which was taking place back in the downtown area and would require us to be in line by 8:45 at the very, very latest). Cabs were called and put on notice to collect us at 8:30, whether “Harold & Kumar” was over or not. If we had to miss what would surely be a mind-bending, super-secret surprise in the final few minutes, so be it.

Meanwhile, we took advantage of the Alamo Drafthouse’s cuisine. As you may know from reading previous SXSW reports or from simply being a cool, happening person, the Alamo is one of the best movie houses in the country. The programming at their several locations is a mix of new releases and goofy special showings, and they offer full food and beverage service delivered right to your seat. It’s good food, too, and an absolutely treasure for festival-goers like us who often don’t have time to eat between screenings. It was the first Alamo experience for Davis and for a couple of our other associates who we ran into there, and Weinberg took particular pleasure in sharing this Austin landmark with them, like an acolyte sharing the gospel with a new convert.

The film finally started at about 7 (we’d already finished eating by then), and it was … meh. I didn’t find it as funny as its predecessor, but it did have some very solid laughs. Worth the wait and the hassle and the agita and the tsuris and the other Yiddish words? Probably not.

We did indeed miss the last two or three minutes in order to catch our cab. It deposited us at the Paramount Theatre, an old movie palace within sight of the capitol building on Congress Avenue that is where all the big SXSW premieres are held. Eugene was already in line, and we were joined by Greg the Volunteer and his girlfriend. Weinberg and I met Greg here at SXSW two years ago and got to be friends with him. Greg was kind enough to let me stay at his place last year and again this year. He even picked me up at the airport last night. He was standing there with a sign that said “White Eric.”

The movie we were all seeing was “21,” about some card-counting math nerds from M.I.T. who go to Vegas on the weekends to make a killing at the blackjack tables. Some of the cast members were allegedly there, but I didn’t see them. Who I did see was Scott Porter, whose role as becrippled quarterback Jason Street on “Friday Night Lights,” filmed ’round these parts, has made him one of Austin’s local celebrities. He was wearing a fedora for no good reason, although I guess I’m not sure what a good reason would have been.

As the theater filled up and people milled around, Davis got out his camera and snapped some pictures of the crowd, causing an usher-slash-security-guard to come over and politely tell him photography is not allowed and they would have to take away his camera if he persisted. When Davis pointed out, also politely (despite being from New York City), that there were at least a dozen other people taking pictures right at that moment, that the theater was practically aglow in the light of camera flashes, the guy just said, “We can’t catch everybody.” I took this to mean, “We’re not even trying to catch anybody, but you happened to be sitting near the back and on the aisle.”

You know what might have helped reduce the amount of photography? A sign somewhere saying, “No photography.” I made this observation aloud, and Weinberg and Davis joked that maybe the rule is only that Jews can’t have cameras. Eugene said there was a sign that said, “No Jews with cameras,” and the reason I hadn’t noticed it was that it was in Hebrew.

SXSW festival director and suave personage Matt Dentler introduced the film, as always; we believe he is a “jumper,” like Hayden Christensen, able to introduce a film in one venue and then introduce another one on the other side of town five minutes later. He is everywhere at once. He presented us with the film’s director, Robert Luketic, who also made “Legally Blonde” and “Monster-in-Law,” and who seemed duly humbled and overwhelmed to have his movie kicking off the SXSW Film Festival.

Too bad it ain’t that good a movie. The card-counting hook is interesting, but the rest of it is generic and ordinary: a nobody becomes a somebody, forsakes his friends, then learns What’s Really Important. YAWN!!

Kim Voynar, another Cinematical editor, had gotten into town just in time for the film, and she’s sharing a hotel room with Melanie, whom Kim and I met in Oxford, Miss., last month. Post-film, the whole lot of us traipsed over to Buffalo Billiards, a 6th Street bar where the official opening night party was being held, but we didn’t stay very long. Kim, Melanie, and I wound up driving off in Kim’s rental car in search of food, and we ended up at the delightful Taco Cabana. As always, eating Mexican food at 1:30 in the morning proved to be a poor decision, but poor decisions are part of the fun of a film festival.

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